Blog

MeetUp at George Brown College

September 6, 2018

George Brown students met with inspiring local healthcare, consulting, and healthcare information technology mentors from a wide range of career levels and sectors at the summer MeetUp at the beautiful George Brown College Waterfront Campus on Thursday, July 19. Students and mentors discussed the state of the digital health industry and shared career development stories and advice while engaging in a round of Speed Networking; participants spend a few minutes together before moving on to the next station. Lively and fast-paced, Speed Networking is a great way to engage with a large number of contacts in one evening. Download a guide to Speed Networking here.

Digital Health Canada MeetUps are ideal for students, emerging professionals in the first five years of their digital health career, and start-up employees/entrepreneurs. Professionals from all career levels contribute to an engaging and interesting evening. Learn more about Digital Health Canada networking events here.

Over the past 10 years, Amos has been focussed on the commercialization, adoption and scale-up of innovative digital health solutions. Having deployed dozens of data-driven patient engagement and support programs in multiple clinical and commercial settings, Amos’s focus has always been creating value from health data. As founder of MEMOTEXT and A4i Inc., his focus is on driving ROI through collaborations.

Susan Anderson is the Managing Director for the Canadian Business with Orion Health. Susan is an accomplished eHealth strategist with more than 20 years’ experience in healthcare informatics. Most recently, she was the Assistant Deputy Minister and CIO for the Health Information Technology and Systems Division at Alberta Health, where she played a pivotal role in transforming Alberta’s healthcare system into one of the most digitally connected in North America. At the forefront of Alberta’s electronic health record (EHR) implementation, she helped steer the expansion of EHR data sources, deployment to users, integration for physicians and pharmacists and introduced public access to EHRs. Susan is the Chair of the National Community of Interest for EHR Governance..

Carina currently works at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton as a Project Manager in the Project Management and Innovation Office. She first started at the organization two years ago as an Senior Project Analyst and Access Lead on the hospital’s Health Information System Epic implementation, the Dovetale Project. Prior to her role at the hospital, Carina worked at Digital Health Canada supporting the development of special projects, publications and communities of interest. Carina graduated from Western University with an Honours Specialization in Health Studies, Minor in Psychology and received her Masters of Science, in eHealth at McMaster University.

Bhavana Patel has 20 years of diverse health care experience, including working as a front-line physiotherapist across the continuum of care, both in Ontario and the UK. She has led cross organizational teams to plan and operationalize national/provincial/regional healthcare transformational initiatives. Most recently, she was the Change Management Lead at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) for the largest most complex clinical transformational project to date at SickKids.Her primary role was to lead the development and operationalization of the Change Management and Benefits Realization Strategy in collaboration with leaders across the organization. This multi year project implemented a new integrated health electronic information system on June 2, 2018 in partnership with the Children’s Hospital for Eastern Ontario (CHEO) and Epic Systems. This new system has significantly changed the way care is delivered, including helping to enhance patient safety, and creating a more seamless experience for patients and families.Prior to SickKids, she held leadership roles at Health Quality Ontario and Canada Health Infoway.

Bhavana is certified in PROSCI ®, Lean HealthCare Green Belt and CPHIMS-CA.She is also a Certified Instructor for Digital Health Canada and is an active member of the pan Canadian Change Management Digital Health Network.

In her spare time, Bhavana enjoys volunteering at SickKids within the Child Life Specialists Program. She is also a passionate traveller and photographer, always looking for new adventures and lifelong learning opportunities.

Iryna is a dynamic, results oriented professional with 20 years of experience in the information technology field. She is a highly motivated IT professional with the unique ability to bridge the gap between technology and business solutions. She has spent the last 16 years in the healthcare industry specializing in solution, business, information and service architecture standards. Iryna has a wealth of experience in clinical, business and systems integration analysis; the ability to communicate complex business and system information resulting in prompt issue and opportunity identification, analysis and problem solving.

Her experience includes planning, developing and implementing innovation information solutions in a variety of technical environments. She is an expert in HL7v2, v3 messaging, Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and FHIR in accordance with the technical standards in place.

As part of healthcare projects performance work, Iryna was involved in creating design documents for all architecture domains including Business, Data, Application, Technology, Security and Privacy; designed implementations of healthcare systems in the virtual environment, and supported the design of high availability solutions with multiple data centres.

Iryna also has excellent analytical, organizational and communication skills and can work seamlessly at all levels of an organization from senior executive, strategic levels to tactical team operations. Implementing interoperable standards and effectively using standard development tools.

Sandra Sabaratnam brings more than 10 years of project management and business analysis experience within the healthcare industry. She has worked with municipal, provincial and federal organizations across Canada (acute care, primary care, public health, pharmacy) to improve health service delivery through information technology. Sandra’s leadership and project management skills enables her to effectively manage health information system implementations and integrations (drug information systems, eReferral, EMRs, EHR, communicable disease and outbreak management systems) while engaging project stakeholders to ensure project success.

Sandra holds a B.Sc. in Health Studies, Health Informatics option from the University of Waterloo. Sandra also holds industry recognized certifications such has PMP, Lean Six Sigma – Green Belt, ITIL Intermediate Certification (Service Strategy), COACH/HIMSS CPHIMS-CA certificate, and the IIBA CBAP certificate. Additionally, she is in the process of becoming a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC).

Michael Savage is a Business Analyst – EMR Validation with OntarioMD’s EMR Certification Team, and an active member of Canada Health Infoway’s FHIR Implementations Working Group. He comes to these positions in the digital health space from a winding road into and throughout the health care system.

Holding an honours degree in Ancient History and several positions in VHA Home HealthCare’s Community Support Program, Michael was accepted to the University of Toronto’s Masters in Health Informatics program in 2015 with limited industry experience but a firm belief that stories and narratives are one of the most powerful lenses through which problems and solutions in the health care system can be discovered and addressed. After three years, and contracts at both the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), the digital side of health care and innovation has proven to be a fantastic space in which to grow, and to empower others.

Just as no story can be told through a single chapter, so too is it impossible to consider a patient’s quality of care and life through a single episode of care, or a single stage of their journey. The interoperability between systems and access to over-arching data assets and services championed by groups such as OntarioMD’s EMR Certification Program and the FHIR Implementations Working Group align strongly to Michael’s commitments in digital health.

Michael’s future focus includes bringing the values and practices of patient, family, and caregiver partnership programs into digital health technology companies, in order to grow the voice and presence of health care’s most important stakeholders in these innovation-driven organizations.

Andrew is a Clinical Project Coordinator for Women’s College Hospital (WCH). Andrew has over five years of professional experience in project management/coordination, healthcare consulting and clinical information systems. At WCH, he is responsible for managing and leading clinical application projects that revolutionizes the delivery of patient care by defining system integration and care transitions. Currently, Andrew is leading the roll-out of WCH’s patient portal (myHealthRecord) and eReferral solution while working with stakeholders to improve functionality and usage of the Ambulatory Electronic Patient Record (aEPR).

Prior to his work at WCH, Andrew acted as a Business Analysis at HInext and aided in the implementation and development of TREAT, a proven electronic health record (EHR) to support a full range of behavioural, medial, and social problems affecting the seriously mental ill.

Andrew holds a Master in Health Informatics (MHI) from the University of Toronto and a BHSc (Hons) in Health Sciences from the University of Western Ontario. As a current guest-lecturer and case partner with the University of Toronto MHI Program – his focus is to collaborate and grow with future health informatics leaders to design, plan, implement, evaluate and refine healthcare initiatives. Andrew holds certifications in Project Management Professional (PMP), ITIL Foundation’s for IT Service Management and Epic’s 2015 Ambulatory, EpicCare Link and MyChart applications.

Christina Wong is an award-winning strategic communications management professional who has spent more than a decade specializing in the development and execution of national initiatives aimed at increasing awareness, education and engagement in health care.

As the Director, Stakeholder Engagement for Canada Health Infoway’s e-prescribing service, PrescribeIT™, Christina brings together PrescribeIT’s diverse stakeholder base to engage and collaborate in support of business and governance objectives. In her prior role, Christina lead the coordinated stakeholder effort behind Digital Health Week (November 12-18, 2018).

TWITTER

Collingwood General and Marine Hospital has opened the first of 5 self-sanitizing rooms and will be the first hospital in Canada to use copper-infused panels on the walls in hallways and rooms to prevent bacteria growth https://t.co/pznfe6alUr @CollingwoodHosp #cdnhealth